Microsoft have finally released the public beta of their World Wide Telescope project, and I just had to write about it. It’s a must for anyone who has to teach about space, or just anyone interested in astronomy.
Basically, its Microsoft’s version of Google Earth/ Google Sky and if you’ve used the Google version in the past then you’ll pick this up very easily.
The software provides a virtual planetarium and lets you study the night sky with great detail. Some of the images are astounding. You can also switch the view to study planets and moons such as Jupiter and Io.
When looking at the stars, right clicking will bring up a star identifier which tells you the name of the star (if known) and some information about it. You can even link direct to the relevant wikipedia page.
Maybe a quick activity would be to search for their star sign (I looked up Aries) and find the names of the stars in the constellation. Maybe even find out how far away they are from Earth.
You can also point the camera downwards and study the Earth instead just like Google Earth, although not in as high resolution. A nice feature is the Earth at Night view which shows just where all the populated areas are. Interesting to use for Geography perhaps?
This is highly recommended and would be an excellent piece of software for anyone who has to teach about the Earth and space. Download it from here.
Here’s a new site that may be useful, What Works Well. I saw this at Teachmeet and it looked like it’s something to bookmark and keep an eye on.
WhatWorksWell is a growing database of case-led studies which describe learning improvement. It’s the place where teaching practitioners can share real studies which have improved learning and teaching. They are ‘case-led’ studies because they start and end with the learning needs of the pupils and the difference made to their progress. You can browse or search for case studies relevant to you. If you register, you can add your own case-led study to describe the impact of your own work on pupils’ learning.
The BBC have launched an area of their gardening website aimed at children. There’s some nice ideas for gardening projects both indoors and outdoors. Take a look and see if any could be used with your class.
Firstly, it’s had to google this without getting lots of hits for classic Pink Floyd albums. Secondly, strictly speaking it’s the *far* side of the moon. It’s not always dark because sometimes it is facing directly at the Sun and is well lit.
Anyway, the question relates to the fact that Moon always keeps the same face facing towards the Earth (and so the same face pointing away). This down to two important facts.
1. The moon rotates on its on axis, it takes approximately 28 days to make one full rotation
2. The moon orbits around the earth. It takes approximately 28 days to make one full orbit.
In the animation below, I have coloured the moon to make it clearer. This is the view from above as it rotates.
As the moon rotates, it is also travelling around the Earth. The Moon has become locked into a pattern – the time it takes to orbit the Earth is the same as the time it takes to make one full rotation – approximately 28 days.
As you can see, as the moon travels around the Earth, it is also rotating. The Red/Yellow face is always kept facing towards the Earth. If we were standing on the Earth looking at the Moon we would only see the Red/Yellow face. We would never be able to see the Blue/Green face.
In the last session I asked for any questions you still had about sections of the Science course. Each of you gave me one question that was still bothering you.
They were
Circuits
When do bulbs shine more or less brightly in a circuit and why?
When do we use Newtons as a measurement in everyday life?
Why can’t we see the dark side of the moon?
Earth tilt and the seasons
Orbits, moons, eclipses
I’ll try and answer these questions over the next few weeks before our last session on this site, plus I’ll discuss them in the final session.
If you want to use YouTube videos and your school blocks access to them, then you need to be able to save them at home, and bring them into school. There are many different ways available now to save a youtube file locally.
This Script can be added to the toolbar of the Firefox web browser. When you see a video you want to save, click the button and then the page changes to allow you to save the file as an .mp4 video file.
All the instructions are on the page and it seems relatively straightforward. The thing to remember is to change the filename from .htm to .mp4 when you save it.
Obviously it goes without saying that you need to be aware that you may be infringing copyright by storing these clips – but this does provide a good workaround for those teachers who want to show a YouTube clip in a lesson where the school have blocked YouTube access.
What happens when you drop a heavy object and a light object at the same time? Well they should hit the ground at exactly the same time. This is because the pull of gravity is the same on each one, and so they accelerate at the same rate.
On Earth it’s hard to visualise this since air resistance also gets involved – and so if you drop a hammer and a feather the feather floats down slower than the hammer.
On the moon, there is no air, so air resistance does not affect the result. One of the experiments carried out by the Apollo astronauts on the moon was to demonstrate a hammer and feather drop and as you can see, without air resistance both the hammer and feather hit the ground at the same time.
Posted by admin | Posted in Uncategorized | Posted on 14-05-2008
Another day, another blog.
The aim of this blog is to give me somewhere to direct my Scitt PGCE Science students, to link to resources they may find useful and to help support their understanding of Science.
It’s a little experimental as I haven’t used WordPress before, normally using Blogger, but it’s worthwhile trying out a different system to see how it works.
